Alan Borning's research while affiliated with University of Washington Seattle and other places
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Publications (160)
Over the past two decades, the business model of surveillance capitalism has emerged in the IT industry. This model has turned out to be highly profitable, but, if left unchecked, will very likely undermine the foundations of liberal democracies and quality of life on this planet. It involves customized advertising and behavior manipulation, powere...
Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) involve the misuse of any or several of a wide array of substances, such as alcohol, opioids, marijuana, and methamphetamine. SUDs are characterized by an inability to decrease use despite severe social, economic, and health-related consequences to the individual. A 2017 national survey identified that 1 in 12 US adul...
It's difficult to see the ecological impact of IT when its benefits are so blindingly bright.
A large portion of the software side of our information technology infrastructure, including web search, email, social media, transportation information, and much more, is provided "free" to the end users, although the corporations that provide this are often enormously profitable. The business model involves customized advertising and behavior man...
While there is widespread recognition of the need to provide people with vision impairments (PVI) equitable access to cultural institutions such as art galleries, this is not easy. We present the results of a collaboration with a regional art gallery who wished to open their collection to PVIs in the local community. We describe a novel model that...
There are significant negative impacts from extracting, processing, maintaining, and ultimately disposing of the materials used to support information technology, as well as of producing the energy it uses, yet these negative impacts receive substantially less attention than discussion of the benefits or technical aspects of IT. This essay presents...
In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Lisa Nathan, Editor
The democratic process is in chaos in many nations. What role has technology played in this to date, and what are realistic goals for the role of technology in the future? How can we best design and develop technologies to support democratic process with participation from community members? How can we learn from deployments and help communities ad...
Quality of life for growing numbers of people on the planet is threatened by a set of integrated, systemic problems in the economy, environment and democracy. The goal of the SEED project is to form an international network of scholar/activists, advocates, and practitioners who seek to address these problems in a similarly integrated fashion. We ar...
Value sensitive design is a theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that accounts for human values in a principled and systematic manner throughout the design process. A Survey of Value Sensitive Design Methods looks at 14 value sensitive design methods, each of which is honed to the investigation of values in technology, servin...
Value sensitive design is a theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that accounts for human values in a principled and systematic manner throughout the design process. In this article we provide a survey of 14 value sensitive design methods: (1) direct and indirect stakeholder analysis; (2) value source analysis; (3) co-evolutio...
Logic puzzles such as Sudoku are described by a set of properties that a valid solution must have. Constraints are a useful technique to describe and solve for such properties. However, constraints are less suited to express imperative interactions in a user interface for logic puzzles, a domain that is more readily expressed in the objectoriented...
A constraint is a declarative description of a relation that we want to have hold, for example, that a set of icons be equally spaced and positioned at the bottom of a window, or that a resistor in an electrical circuit simulation obey Ohm’s Law. A constraint can support modularity in programs by providing a succinct way to express some property, i...
Wallingford is an experimental constraint reactive programming language that supports objects with state, persistent constraints on those objects, and reactive constraints that enable the system to respond to events by declaring constraints that become active when an event occurs, or while a condition holds. It is implemented in Rosette, a solver-a...
Object-constraint programming systems integrate declarative constraint solving with imperative, object-oriented languages, seamlessly providing the power of both paradigms. However, experience with object-constraint systems has shown that giving too much power to the constraint solver opens up the potential for solutions that are surprising and uni...
Imperative programming has great merits. As the ubiquitous style, it is familiar, and its linear and step by step nature is favored by the human mind. Experienced programmers, however, are aware of its major flaw: it is easy for meanings to get lost in piles of code, making software hard to understand, extend, and debug. Constraint-based programmin...
New programming language designs are often evaluated on concrete implementations. However, in order to draw conclusions about the language design from the evaluation of concrete programming languages, these implementations need to be verified against the formalism of the design. To that end, we also have to ensure that the design actually meets its...
Real-time transit information offers many benefits to transit riders, including reduced wait times and increased customer satisfaction. However, offering real-time transit services has been challenging for many transit agencies. While mobile applications (apps) have emerged as a preferred dissemination method for real-time information, it is typica...
Locating bus stops, particularly in unfamiliar areas, can present challenges to people who are blind or low vision. At the same time, new information technology such as smart phones and mobile devices have enabled them to undertake a much greater range of activities with increased indepen-dence. We focus on the intersection of these issues. We deve...
Constraints provide a useful technique for ensuring that desired properties hold in an application. As a result, they have been used in a wide range of applications, including graphical layout, simulation, scheduling, and problem-solving. We describe the design and implementation of an Object Constraint Programming language, an object-oriented lang...
Constraints allow developers to specify desired properties of systems in a number of domains, and have those properties be maintained automatically. This results in compact, declarative code, avoiding scattered code to check and imperatively re-satisfy invariants. Despite these advantages, constraint programming is not yet widespread, with imperati...
Public dialogue plays a key role in democratic society. Such dialogue often contains factual claims, but participants and readers are left wondering what to believe, particularly when contributions to such dialogue come from a broad spectrum of the public. We explore the design space for introducing authoritative information into public dialogue, w...
Power dynamics shape, and are shaped by, the tools used by participants in social movements. In this study we explore the values, attitudes, and beliefs of Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street stakeholders as they relate to their use of technology. This multi-method study applies the lens of value sensitive design [VSD; Friedman, B. (Ed.) (1997). Human...
When presented in a practical format, real-time transit information can improve sustainable travel methods by enhancing the transit experience. This paper identifies the positive shift realized by the continued development of the OneBusAway set of real-time transit information tools. In addition, the paper analyzes real-time prediction errors and t...
Although the practice of Context Sensitive Solutions instructs transportation designers to respect community values, the focus is typically on the surroundings of the project rather than the direct and indirect stakeholders who will be impacted by a solution. Therefore, the team designing the One Bus Away transit traveler information system turned...
Personal informatics applications in a variety of domains are increasingly enabled by low cost personal sensing. Although applications capture fine-grained activity for self reflection, sharing is generally limited to high level summaries. There are potential advantages to fine-grained sharing, but also potential harms. To help investigate this com...
Although it is apparent that providing useful information has a positive effect on transit riders, no studies to date have investigated bus operators’ reactions to real-time arrival information and other potential rider information tools. In this study, the project team surveyed 253 bus operators to determine their views and values concerning the e...
Technology plays an increasingly important role in enabling activist agendas, supporting activist activities and self-organization, bringing people together on causes they support and developing tools and platforms to scaffold activist activities. This panel explores both the role of HCI in activism and activism in HCI.
Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very nature. This has raised the normative concern that users may opt to encounter only political information and perspectives that accord with their preexisting views. This study examines the different ways that voters appropriated a new, purpose-built online en...
Questions of human values often arise in HCI research and practice. Such questions can be difficult to address well, and a principled approach can clarify issues of both theory and practice. One such approach is Value Sensitive Design (VSD), an established theory and method for addressing issues of values in a systematic and principled fashion in t...
A lack of support for active listening undermines discussion and deliberation on the web. We contribute a design frame identifying potential improvements to web discussion were listening more explicitly encouraged in interfaces. We explore these concepts through a novel interface, Reflect, that creates a space next to every comment where others can...
We present a novel platform for supporting public deliberation on difficult decisions. ConsiderIt guides people to reflect on tradeoffs and the perspectives of others by framing interactions around pro/con points that participants create, adopt, and share. ConsiderIt surfaces the most salient pros and cons overall, while also enabling users to dril...
In order to attract more choice riders, transit service must not only have a high level of service in terms of frequency and travel time but also must be reliable. Although transit agencies continuously work to improve on-time performance, such efforts often come at a substantial cost. One inexpensive way to combat the perception of unreliability f...
A self-governed, open contributor system such as Wikipedia depends upon those who are invested in the system to participate
as administrators. Processes for selecting which system contributors will be allowed to assume administrative roles in such
communities have developed in the last few years as these systems mature. However, little is yet known...
We designed, built, and deployed ConsiderIt to support the Living Voters Guide, a website where any voter could participate in writing a voters' guide for the 2010 election in Washington. ConsiderIt is a new method of integrating the thoughts of many into a coherent form, while nudging people to consider tradeoffs of difficult decisions with an int...
Blind and deaf-blind people often rely on public transit for everyday mobility, but using transit can be challenging for them. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 blind and deaf-blind people to understand how they use public transit and what human values were important to them in this domain. Two key values were identified: independence...
In professional activities, qualifications earned through training or multiple years of practice, vouch for a person’s ability to maintain certain standards in his or her work. Analogous mass collaborative efforts, however, often rely instead
Public transit systems play an important role in providing mobility, combating traffic congestion, reducing carbon emissions, and promoting compact, sustainable urban communities. The usability of transit can be significantly enhanced by providing good traveler information systems. OneBusAway is a set of transit tools focused on providing real-time...
Public transit systems play an important role in combating traffic congestion, reducing carbon emissions, and promot- ing compact, sustainable urban communities. The usability of public transit can be significantly enhanced by providing good traveler information systems. We describe OneBus- Away, a set of transit tools focused on providing real-tim...
An increasing number of high-tech devices, such as driver monitoring systems and Internet usage monitoring tools, are advertised as useful or even necessary for good parenting of teens. Simultaneously, there is a growing market for mobile "personal safety" devices. As these trends merge, there will be significant implications for parent-teen relati...
Real-time arrival information can significantly enhance the usability of public transit systems. OneBusAway provides such information to more than 7,000 Seattle-area bus riders ’ mobile devices every day. By helping travelers move from single-occupancy vehicles to public transit systems, communities can reduce traffic congestion as well as its envi...
Implantable medical devices (IMDs) improve patients' qual - ity of life and help sustain their lives. In this study, we explore patient views and values regarding their devices to inform the design of computer security for wireless IMDs. We interviewed 13 individuals with implanted cardiac de- vices. Key questions concerned the evaluation of 8 mock...
In this chapter the authors present two methodologies: Modelling & Matching methodology (M&M) and Value Sensitive Design (VSD), which can help address the knowledge gap in the methodologies for designing e-Planning systems. Designed to address the requirements of diverse user groups and multidisciplinary cooperation for systems development, these t...
Decisions regarding major urban transportation projects and land use policies are frequently political and contro- versial, as well as having signicant economic, social, and environmental consequences. UrbanSim is a disaggregate, behaviorally-realistic modeling environment that planning agencies can use to simulate the long-term eects of such decis...
Supporting public participation is often a key goal in the design of digital government systems. However, years of work may be required before a complex system, such as the UrbanSim urban simulation system, is deployed and ready for such participation. In this paper, we investigate laying the foundations for public participation in information desi...
Introduction What is Value Sensitive Design? The Tripartite Methodology: Conceptual, Empirical, and Technical Investigations Value Sensitive Design in Practice: Three Case Studies Value Sensitive Design's Constellation of Features Practical Suggestions for Using Value Sensitive Design Conclusion Acknowledgments References
Wikipedia is an example SMT where large numbers of online actions can be observed. The Wikimedia Foundation provides regular releases of the complete contents of Wikipedia. These releases include all article, user, discussion, and administrative pages, each with the complete revision history. These regular releases have made it possible for us to c...
Public transit is an important tool for those looking to ease their commutes, reduce their car dependence, or perhaps minimize their environmental impact. Unfortunately, the usability of transit systems often leaves much to be desired, to the point of deterring new riders. Tools on the web and mobile devices are increasingly being used to help tame...
The regional, national, and global policy issues we are confronting are growing increasingly daunting, while institutional capacities for taking effective action are lagging. We need to better support citizens and governments in producing
Decisions regarding urban transportation investments such as building a new light rail system or freeway extension, or changes
in land use policies such as zoning to encourage compact development and curb low-density urban sprawl, have significant and
long-term economic, social, and environmental consequences. Further, land use and transportation d...
UrbanSim is a modeling system for simulating the development of urban regions over periods of 20--30 years. Its purpose is to help evaluate alternative proposed policies and transportation infrastructure projects by simulating the long-term impacts of the different alternatives. In the process of adapting and calibrating the system for use in a new...
Supporting public participation is often a key goal in the design of digital government systems. However, years of work may be required before a complex system, such as the UrbanSim urban simulation system, is deployed and ready for such participation. In this paper, we investigate laying the foundations for public participation in advance of wide-...
By its nature, the discipline of human computer interaction must take into consideration the issues that are most pertinent to humans. We believe that the CHI community faces an unanswered challenge in the creation of interactive systems: sustainability. For example, climate scientists argue that the most serious consequences of climate change can...
UrbanSim is a large scale land use and transportation simulator that models the possible long-term effects of different policies on urban regions. The output is presented using indicators, which are variables that convey information on significant aspects of the simulation results. To support their use, we designed and implemented the Indicator Bro...
Sophisticated simulation systems such as UrbanSim model the long-term impacts of transportation and land-use alternatives. Accounting for human values throughout the design process helps in designing interactions that engage both planners and citizens in the decision-making process. Our future work includes further research on applying UrbanSim in...
Automated tests can play a key role in ensuring system qual- ity in software development. However, signican t problems arise in automating tests of stochastic algorithms. Normally, developers write tests that simply check whether the ac- tual result is equal to the expected result (perhaps within some tolerance). But for stochastic algorithms, rest...
Constraints are declarative statements of relations among elements of the language's computational domain, e.g., integers,
booleans, strings, and other objects. Orthogonally, the tools of object-oriented programming, including encapsulation, inheritance,
and dynamic message binding, provide important mechanisms for extending a language's domain. Al...
Linear equality and inequality constraints arise naturally in specifying many aspects of user interfaces, such as requiring that one window be to the left of another, requiring that a pane occupy the leftmost of a window, or preferring that an object be contained within a rectangle if possible. For interactive use, we need to solve similar constrai...
Value Sensitive Design is a theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner throughout the design process. It employs an integrative and iterative tripartite methodology, consisting of conceptual, empirical, and technical investigations. We explicate Value Sensitive...
The process of planning and constructing a new light rail system or freeway, setting an urban growth boundary, changing tax policy, or modifying zoning and land use plans is often politically charged. Our goal in the UrbanSim project is to provide tools for stakeholders to be able to consider different scenarios, and then to evaluate these scenario...
Resource managers face significant information technology (IT) problems when integrating ecological or environmental information to make decisions. At this NSF/USGS workshop in December 2004 [1], university researchers, natural resource managers, and information managers articulated five IT problems areas facing ecology and environmental decision m...
Several research teams working on integrated land use, transportation and environmental modelling have begun an international collaboration to develop an Open Platform for Urban Simulation (OPUS). The initiative is creating an Open Source platform that simulates land use, activity- based travel demand, and dynamic traffic assignment, and that can b...
The goal of the UsersAward programme is to develop and maintain a strategy for better workplace software through user-driven quality assessment. One of its key activities is the user-driven certification of workplace software using the USER CERTIFIED 2002 instrument. In this paper we present a preliminary analysis of the values that inform the crit...
'Today' messages are short status emails sent daily by members of a project team. We present the results of a field study of the use of 'today' messages by six small work groups over six weeks. The evaluation focuses on the benefits and costs of daily email messages, their effect on group work practice, and a careful investigation using Value Sensi...
We investigate informing public deliberation regarding major land use and transportation decisions with the results from a sophisticated computer simulation of urban development. Our specific focus is on indicators that portray key results from the simulations. Our design addresses a number of challenges, including responding to the values and inte...
IntroductionPatterns of land use and available transportation systems play a critical role in determining the economicvitality, livability, and sustainability of urban areas. Transportation interacts strongly with land use. Forexample, automobile-oriented development induces demand for more roads and parking (which in turninduces more automobile-or...
UrbanSim is a large-scale simulation system that models the development of urban areas over periods of 20 or more years. Its purpose is to help citizens and local governments make more informed decisions about major transportation and land use issues, by projecting the long-term consequences of the different alternatives. Citizens often bring stron...
n for the Salt Lake City,Utah, region); and the Puget Sound Regional Council (Seattle, Washington, and other cities and suburbs inthe region). In the Salt Lake City region, UrbanSim played a central role in a lawsuit over a major highwayproject (the "Legacy Parkway"). The suit was settled out of court, with a central provision being anagreement by...
The process of planning and constructing a new light rail system or freeway, setting an urban growth boundary, changing tax policy, or modifying zoning and land use plans is often politically charged. Our goal in the UrbanSim project is to provide tools for planners and stakeholders to be able to consider different scenarios --- packages of possibl...
The UrbanSim project provides a case study in Digital Government, and this article examines progress to date in developing and applying the system in a range of metropolitan areas. Digital Government is meant here in the context of an innovative, cross-cutting initiative of the National Science Foundation. The project integrates academic research o...
In this paper, we offer an alternative vision for domain driven development (3D). Our approach is model driven and emphasizes the use of generic and specific domain oriented programming (DOP) languages. DOP uses strong specific languages, which directly ...
Chairs of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Craig Chambers Professor David Notkin Computer Science and Engineering Software architecture describes the high-level structure of a software system, and can be used for design, analysis, and software evolution tasks. However, existing tools decouple architecture from implementation, allowing inconsist...
Chairs of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Craig Chambers Professor David Notkin Computer Science and Engineering Software architecture describes the high-level structure of a software system, and can be used for design, analysis, and software evolution tasks. However, existing tools decouple architecture from implementation, allowing inconsist...
YP is an agile programming methodology that has evolved over the past 15 years. Many of its features are common to other agile methodologies; its novel features include using a highly visible, physical software status indicator (a real traffic light), and a well-defined nested set of development cycles. It is also an exceptionally open process, wit...
The overall topic of the panel was modeling urban land use, transportation, and environmental impacts over periods of 20 or more years, under alternate scenarios, with a particular focus on the UrbanSim system. John Britting described the local context at the Wasatch Front Regional Council, the Metropolitan Planning Organization for Salt Lake City...
The UrbanSim project provides a case study in Digital Government, and this article examines progress to date in developing and applying the system in a range of metropolitan areas. Digital Government is meant here in the context of an innovative, cross-cutting initiative of the National Science Foundation. The project integrates academic research o...
approach to the design of technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner throughout the design process. It employs an integrative and iterative tripartite methodology, consisting of conceptual, empirical, and technical investigations. We explicate Value Sensitive Design by drawing on three research and design pro...
'Today' messages are short daily status emails sent by members of a project team to each other. Their original purpose was to take the place of status updates at meetings. However, they had the unexpected additional effect of increasing group task awareness at very low cost. We present the results of a small study of 'today' messages and their effe...
'Today' messages are short daily status emails sent by members of a project team to each other. Their original purpose was to take the place of status updates at meetings. However, they had the unexpected additional effect of increasing group task awareness at very low cost. We present the results of a small study of 'today' messages and their effe...
UrbanSim is a new urban simulation model, developed over the past several years, which is now operational in three urban areas in the United States. The model system is designed to address emerging needs to better coordinate transportation and land use planning as a result of recognition of the strong interactions between land use and transportatio...
this paper we shall concentrate on a simple strength heirarchy of three levels, required, strong and weak which is expressive enough for many constraint-based graphical problems
Linear equality and inequality constraints arise naturally in specifying many aspects of user interfaces, such as requiring that one window be to the left of another, requiring that a pane occupy the leftmost 1/3 of a window, or preferring that an object be contained within a rectangle if possible. For interactive use, we need to solve similar cons...
Newsgroups and online discussion boards have long been used to supplement class discussions. We describe a study comparing the use of two systems, WebAnn and EPost, to support class discussion of technical papers in a graduate course. WebAnn is a shared annotation system that supports anchored discussions on web pages, and allows users to easily as...
In interactive graphical applications we often require that objects do not overlap. Such non-overlap constraints can be modelled as disjunctions of arithmetic inequalities. Unfortunately, disjunctions are typically not handled by constraint solvers that support direct manipulation, in part because solving such problems is NP-hard. We show here that...
ABSTRACT Newsgroups,and online discussion boards have long been used to supplement class discussions. We describe a study comparing the use of two systems, WebAnn and EPost, to support class discussion of technical papers in a graduate course. WebAnn is a shared annotation system that supports anchored discussions on web pages, and allows users to...
Value Sensitive Design (VSD) seeks to design technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner throughout the design process (Friedman, 1997). In this paper, we show how VSD can be seen as extending Alexander's (1979) idea of a pattern to frame a larger research and design program on human values and information tec...
Urban planning experts often use computer models to help evaluate alternative land use policies, particularly as they interact with transportation and environmental decisions. The greatly increased data volume provided by new land use models makes their e#ective use difficult without suitable visualization tools. We present UrbanView, a visualizati...
Automatic Visual Display Design and Creation by Leslie Denise Pinnel Salisbury Chairperson of Supervisory Committee Professor Alan Borning Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Washington This dissertation explores the concepts behind creating useful visualizations for the analysis and understanding of simulation environments...
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a language that describes two-dimensional vector graphics for storage and distribution on the Web. Unlike raster image formats, SVG-based images scale nicely to arbitrary resolutions and sizes. However, the current SVG standard provides little flexibility for taking into account varying viewing conditions, such as...
UrbanSim simulates the development of urban areas, including land use, transportation, and environmental impacts, over periods of 20 or more years. Its purpose is to aid urban planners, residents, and elected officials in evaluating the long-term results of alternate plans, particularly as they relate to such issues as housing, business and economi...
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a language developed by the World Wide Web Consortium for describing two dimensional vector graphics for storage and distribution on the Web. Unlike raster image formats, SVG-based images scale nicely to arbitrary resolutions and sizes. We introduce a constraint extension to SVG called Constraint Scalable Vector Gr...
